Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Twitter is certainly an interesting phenomenon, but it also has its annoyances. This morning I saw a brief mention of Twitter considering ads. No real surprise there, but it got me thinking. By writing tweets, I am providing Twitter with content for free. I am basically working for Twitter with zero compensation. So what do I really get out of the deal? Twitter does help to promote blog posts (but does not give any actual Google juice) and does provide an "outlet" for excess energy, but that is about it. Maybe once in a blue moon somebody actually connects with somebody in a valuable way, but that is the exception rather than the rule. In short, the answer to the question "What value do I get from Twitter?" is not much at all and certainly nothing comparable to the effort invested.

Twitter is still a young phenomenon and evolving over time, so maybe a few months or a few years from now Twitter will actually, finally have some features that deliver significant value to me. But for new, Twitter is, well, I hate to say this, but, a complete waste of my time. I would not say that all of my time in Twitter has been wasted since it has been an interesting experiment with a new technology, but I have definitely reached well beyond the point of diminishing returns.

So, to be clear, I do not consider my time spent with Twitter a complete waste of time, but simply that the marginal value has been too small, for me, personally.

Twitter may have great value for some people, but I am not one of them.

Besides, I now have some real, billable work to do, so Twitter really is an unnecessary and unproductive distraction, for me.

And, there have been any number of times where I could have posted a more valuable blog post, but took the lazy route of a simple tweet instead. My loss.

BTW, I have over 3,000 tweets, so it is not as if I haven't given Twitter a chance to prove itself.

I am not sure how long my hiatus will last. Could be a few months, or maybe a year or more, or maybe just a few weeks. Three to six months would be my preliminary estimate. I may check in on occasion just to see if I have been missing anything. The bottom line is that I'll stay away from Twitter as long as it continues to show very little promise of adding any significant value to my life. So, my hiatus could in fact be extended to infinity.

My hiatus will also give me some extra time to contemplate my experiences with Tweeter and maybe even distill them down to realize what value, if any, they have for me.

If anybody really does see a true breakthrough in Twitter that really would add dramatic value to my life, please send me an email message about it.

Now, it is time for my to go tweet my final tweet and then get back to real work.

Friday, April 9, 2010

How dumb could a software agent be and still be considered an intelligent agent, presuming that it can communicate with and take advantage of the services of other, more intelligent software agents?

This still begs the question of how we define or measure the intelligence of a specific software agent. Do we mean the raw, native intelligence contained wholly within that agent, or the effective intelligence of that agent as seen from outside of that agent and with no knowledge as to how the agent accomplishes its acts of intelligence?

We can speak of the degree to which a specific agent leverages the intelligence of other agents. Whether we can truly measure and quantify this leverage is another matter entirely.

In humans we see the effect that each of us can take advantage of the knowledge (and hence to some degree the intelligence) of others. Still, we also speak of the intelligence of the individual.

Maybe a difference is that with software agents, they are much more likely to be highly interconnected at a very intimate level, compared to normal humans, so that agents would typically operate as part of a multi-mind at a deeper level rather than as individuals loosely operating in social groups as humans do. Or, maybe it is a spectrum and we might have reasons for choosing to design or constrain groups of agents to work with varying degrees of interconnectivity, dependence, and autonomy.

So, maybe the answer to the question is that each agent can be extremely dumb or at least simple-minded, provided that it is interconnected with other agents into a sufficiently interconnected multi-mind.

But even that answer begs the question, leading us to ponder what the minimal degree of interconnectivity is that can sustain intelligence.

How dumb could a software agent be and still be considered intelligent, presuming that it can communicate with and take advantage of the services of other, more intelligent software agents?

This still begs the question of how we define or measure the intelligence of a specific software agent. Do we mean the raw, native intelligence contained wholly within that agent, or the effective intelligence of that agent as seen from outside of that agent and with no knowledge as to how the agent accomplishes its acts of intelligence?

We can speak of the degree to which a specific agent leverages the intelligence of other agents. Whether we can truly measure and quantify this leverage is another matter entirely.

In humans we see the effect that each of us can take advantage of the knowledge (and hence to some degree the intelligence) of others. Still, we also speak of the intelligence of the individual.

Maybe a difference is that with software agents, they are much more likely to be highly interconnected at a very intimate level, compared to normal humans, so that agents would typically operate as part of a multi-mind at a deeper level rather than as individuals loosely operating in social groups as humans do. Or, maybe it is a spectrum and we might have reasons for choosing to design or constrain groups of agents to work with varying degrees of interconnectivity, dependence, and autonomy.

So, maybe the answer to the question is that each agent can be extremely dumb or at least simple-minded, provided that it is interconnected with other agents into a sufficiently interconnected multi-mind.

But even that answer begs the question, leading us to ponder what the minimal degree of interconnectivity is that can sustain intelligence.

Here's an interesting article that posits that our true rate of innovation is declining:

One of the strangest portents of the end of progress is the recent discovery that humans are losing their ability to come up with new ideas.

... "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected  not in any particular area, just generally."

... the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation  which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year  is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.

Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.

Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."

I would summarize the problem as that our main focus is to be extremely good at repackaging and repurposing old wine in new bottles.

In my view, we have far too much "fake innovation". Even worse, we place far to great a value on fake over true innovation.

To make my point: Here we are a whole decade into the 21st century and NOBODY is knocking on my door or accosting me on the street and demanding that I should do some true innovation. Nobody. Oh, sure, some people want to cure cancer or prevent climate change and such, but nobody wants to pursue, for example, ... "progress of the human mind" (Kurzweil seems to want to eliminate it as if it were a form of cancer.)